Tupac Shakur is remembered, especially in the media, for two things: his rap career and his tragic end. But music journalist and author Dean Van Nguyen believes there’s more to his story.
His book, Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur, takes a very different look at the rapper’s life and that of his mother, Afeni Shakur, a former member of the Black Panther Party who was a fierce advocate for the deconstruction of American imperialism. It’s a passion both shared.
Van Nguyen recounts Shakur’s childhood and how it informed his activism
In his book, Van Nguyen explores the influence Afeni’s activism and involvement in the Black Panther Party had on the rapper. The author chronicles Shakur’s childhood, which was spent among communists and Marxists, and how it influenced his music.
Shakur’s family was made up of revolutionaries, including members of the Panther 21, a group of community activists who oversaw drug treatment facilities, and prominent figures in the Black Liberation Army. The rapper was also surrounded by political activist Bobby Seale, Maya Angelou, those affiliated with Weather Underground, a Marxist militant organization, and others. Their words and efforts shaped Shakur, his music, and his passion for addressing America’s systemic and institutional injustices.
Nguyen calls on oral histories and conversations with those close to Shakur, like Panther elder Aaron Dixon, music video director Stephen Ashley Blake, and peers of Afeni. Their commentary helps paint a detailed picture of the rapper and his spellbinding approach to activism and self-expression.
Diving into a particular time in history
The book also delves into a pivotal time in American history as the people in Shakur’s world fought to have their voices heard in the 1970s. The rapper had a front-row seat to the dawn of Black nationalism, which has influenced more recent social justice movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.
But the book isn’t just for those passionate about social justice. Words for My Comrades also explores hip-hop and rap’s roots, starting with the creation and evolution of jazz to the beginning of the genre in the 1970s and beyond.
Where and when can you buy the book?
The Doubleday-published book is now available at several retailers and online.
Read an exclusive excerpt below:
From WORDS FOR MY COMRADES: A Political History of Tupac Shakur by Dean Van Nguyen. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Dean Van Nguyen.
Almost a quarter century after his death, Tupac’s voice rang out on the streets of New Zealand. Kiwis hit the pavement as part of a show of global solidarity with America’s Black Lives Matter protests against the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, in Minneapolis by forty-four-year-old white police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes while he was handcuffed and sprawled across the ground, face down.
Demonstrations sometimes require a unifying anthem, and from speakers powerful enough to ring throughout the streets came the sounds of the 2Pac’s “Changes.” As it blared, the galvanized crowd jumped up and down in bursts of exaltation, their limbs and plac ards flailing in all directions. A video of the moment was posted online. It was even seen by Bruce Hornsby, writer of the song “The Way It Is,” which “Changes” heavily adopts. I’ve spoken to many artists over the years who’ve hated being sampled, seeing the move as being derivative or lamenting that their message was skewed. Not Hornsby, though. He was moved by what he had helped ignite. “This is so beautiful,” the musician posted on social media.
It’s strange to consider that 2Pac never heard the version of “Changes” that made such a deep impact on the world. His defining statement on police brutality, mass incarceration, the war on drugs, and economic inequality—and his plea for change—was assembled after his death and added to Greatest Hits, a very important, expertly assembled double-disc release that solidified 2Pac’s reputation as a legendary rap artist.
“Changes” goes all the way back to Christmas Day 1991. It was at Hyde Street Studios in San Francisco, where Tupac, too rest less to stop working even on Yule night, met with “Brenda’s Got a Baby” producer Deon “Big D the Impossible” Evans. So surprised was the studio that someone would want to record on the holiday that they’d scheduled maintenance on one of their machines to take place.
Once there, Tupac fondled a cassette tape of Bruce Hornsby and the Range’s 1986 hit “The Way It Is” and told Big D he wanted to use it in his own song. As the producer extracted the sample and crafted the beat, 2Pac penned his verses. The version they recorded that night is rougher than the canonical edit released years later, the chief difference being that Big D’s original adds the use of a Run-DMC “It’s Like That” to the Hornsby sample (when 2Pac declares “That’s the way it is,” it’s punctuated by the Brooklynite’s utterances of the same words). For the 1998 version, production duo Trackmasters were brought in to smooth the arrangement for mainstream radio.
The rapid spread of rallies under the Black Lives Matter banner was dizzying—I attended them in Dublin in solidarity with activists protesting the murder of George Floyd, and in solidarity with Ireland’s Black community. But Black Lives Matter meant a variety of things to those who embraced it. For some, it didn’t stretch beyond the statement itself: precious Black life was not being valued by police and needed to be safeguarded. For others, it’s an organization of the same name with its own political goals and purpose. To radicals, BLM is in a tradition that counts among its past contributors the Black Panthers—a Marxist movement with various left-wing objectives, including defunding the police, dismantling capitalism, smashing the patriarchy, seeking reparations for slavery, and raising money to bail out Black prisoners awaiting trial.
Released two years after his death, “Changes” encouraged peo ple to remember the best of Tupac. It has been heralded for a mes sage that has felt timeless, prophetic even. When the Black Lives Matter movement took shape in 2013, Tupac’s words seemed even more potent. When I heard that a painting of Tupac adorns a wall in the home of Colin Kaepernick, it reminded me of a quote cred ited to him that has proved prophetic: “I’m not saying I’m gonna change the world, but I guarantee that I will spark the brain that will change the world.” In tumultuous times, a new generation has hugged him closely.
There’s a key section in “Changes,” when 2Pac summons activ ism of the past: “‘It’s time to fight back,’ that’s what Huey said / Two shots in the dark, now Huey’s dead / I got love for my brother / But we can never go nowhere unless we share with each other.” In a small way, any BLM activist moved by “Changes” is infused by the spirit of Huey through Tupac.
One particular lyric took on new meaning in 2009: “And although it seems heaven-sent / We ain’t ready to see a Black presi dent.” Did 2Pac mean America as a nation simply would not vote in adequate numbers to elect a Black commander in chief, or does the first bar, the idea of false hope, signal a belief that such a president would do little to cure the country’s racism? The radical left’s dis appointment with Obama would suggest the latter. Tupac himself hated American imperialism and war, and likely would have been sickened by the drone bombs unleashed on Obama’s watch. Too much civilian death in Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia has never been justified.
What’s undeniable, though, is how Obama’s rise to power elec trified the USA and beyond. There on November 4, 2008, was the president-elect with all his charisma, wisdom, and beauty— abolisher of a historically terrible Republican regime; symbol of a blood-soaked nation’s racial progress. Just as the famous Che Gue vara poster encapsulates rebellion, that stencil portrait of Obama in red, beige, and blue—the word “hope” laid out below—became a symbol of liberal promise and progressive values. (As it happens, designer Shepard Fairey has expressed his dissatisfaction with Obama, singling out the drone strikes for criticism.) As much as there is to lament about Obama’s time in office, when I see that poster, I find myself back in 2008. It’s like a mental bookmark back to an era when I believed a young, principled politician could oper ate in the current U.S. system and cure a nation’s social ills—an idea that itself feels revolutionary. Jesse Jackson cried tears of joy as he awaited Obama’s victory speech. That election night felt like an event worthy of echoing The Simpsons’ Jasper Beardsley and his astonishment at the sight of a packaged moon pie: What a time to be alive. If only those positive feelings could be bottled and pre served for when we most needed them. Even an aging founder of the Panthers was moved. “Electoral politics was always an objective of the Black Panther party, so Barack Obama is a part of what we dreamed and struggled and died for,” said Bobby Seale, who once ran for mayor of Oakland as a Democrat himself.
In 2012, Jamal Joseph was asked if Obama’s presidency had changed anything: “Things changed, in the sense that we have a Black President, and that people were able to rally together to make that happen. But when you have any leader who is presiding over a broken system, there is still a lot of work to be done. Yes, we have a Black president, but the system is still broken. People are strug gling; things are hard each and every day.
“I still live in Harlem. It’s interesting, because of the contrast of the co-ops and the condo buildings. We have more white neigh bors. But when I walk through those streets and those projects—I have kids in my youth program who are homeless, or who are strug gling to make ends meet, whose best meal of the day is the one that we given [sic] them at Impact (the arts program that he founded and leads). That reminds me of when I was a Panther, and the best meal of the day was for the kids we fed in the breakfast program. I don’t feel this glorious change. The country is more polarized. You have a lot of Americans saying, we don’t want him because he’s black. How far have we come really?”
While Obama’s record is there to be scrutinized, what you can’t deny is the meaning of Obama, and the conservative backlash to his symbolism that helped birth Trumpism, and, inversely, intensified the Black Lives Matter movement’s pushback. You can spot Tupac’s handprints all over the BLM era. The Hate U Give, a young adult book by Angie Thomas, is inspired by the Black Lives Matter move ment, but also, as the title suggests, by Tupac and his Thug Life mantra. The plot concerns a sixteen-year-old Black girl who wit nesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend at the hands of a police officer. The book hit number one on the New York Times young adult best-seller list, where it remained for fifty weeks, and it was turned into an equally well-received movie the following year. Tupac’s influence is most palpable through one of his successors: Kendrick Lamar. In 2015, to mark the nineteenth anniversary of Tupac’s death, the Compton rapper wrote an ode to his hero: “I was 8 yrs old when I first saw you. I couldn’t describe how I felt at that moment. So many different emotions. Full of excitement. Full of joy and eagerness. 20 yrs later I understand exactly what that feel ing was. INSPIRED. The people that you touched on that small intersection changed lives forever. I told myself I wanted to be a voice for man one day. Whoever knew I was speaking out loud for u to listen. Thank you.”
Kendrick’s admiration for Tupac was a core tenet of his 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly, a capsule of American political turmoil during an intensification of activity among organizers of the Black Lives Matter movement, often recognized as one of the greatest rap LPs ever made. The conclusion of To Pimp a Butterfly sees Lamar speak to Tupac himself, using the effect of dubbing newly recorded conversation over clips from an old Tupac interview. There’s no doubting the voice as soon as you hear it. The accent, the intona tion are instantly recognizable, iconic. He has also said that its orig inal title was Tu Pimp a Caterpillar, a backronym to honor his hero. Kendrick’s music had always featured a healthy dollop of refer ences to Tupac. But by calling on Tupac’s ghost, Lamar was seeking guidance—not just for himself, but for Black Lives Matter and the nation. To Pimp a Butterfly included the song “Alright,” undeniably the defining anthem of BLM—a hymn of strength, unity, peace, and defiance—like “Changes,” regularly heard chanted at protests. On the back of the album, Kendrick was heralded as a voice of his generation.
It’s not surprising that Tupac’s life, words, and music should be seen as relevant as blood was being spilled on the streets of Fergu son, Cleveland, New York, Minneapolis, Baton Rouge, and else where. Police brutality had been the center of his music since his debut album—his commentary chillingly came to pass when he was violently arrested for jaywalking in 1991. There are songs such as “Point the Finga,” where Tupac describes getting lynched by cops who invariably face no consequences. On “Hellrazor,” a song about the degenerative cycle of chaos and violence that can consume a life, he speaks of cops who seek him as part of an investigation, because, he says, “I’m marked for death.”
The Black Lives Matter movement echoes much of what Tupac envisioned Thug Life to be about. It had been the greatest moment of pro-Black activism since the Black Panthers era. “They exist as a continual barometer to measure ourselves against-both in terms of lessons that have been garnered as well as challenges in terms of where we can improve or deepen our analysis,” Aislinn Pulley, a co founder of Black Lives Matter Chicago and a co-executive director of the Chicago Torture Justice Center, told Time. And there was Tupac, the ideal midpoint between both movements.
In a report that harked right back to the days of COIN–TELPRO, leaked FBI documents indicated that “black identity extremists”—or those who “use force or violence in violation of criminal law in response to perceived racism and injustice in Ameri can society”—were among the agency’s top counterterrorism priorities under President Donald Trump, even considered a bigger threat than terror groups such as Al Qaeda. Under a cryptic strategy titled “IRON FIST,” the leaked documents suggest the bureau plans to use infiltration and other undercover techniques to “mitigate” threats posed by Black extremist groups, including exploiting the felony status of some members.
As U.S. foreign policy has come under scrutiny, Tupac’s words again felt relevant. To Scott Pelley’s question, “Are the wars in Israel and Ukraine more than the United States can take on at the same time?” President Joe Biden answered: “No. We’re the United States of America for God’s sake, the most powerful nation in the history—not in the world, in the history of the world. The history of the world. We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense.”
It was impossible not to remember one of Tupac’s most lasting lyrics: “They got money for wars but can’t feed the poor.”
